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The Big Lie through the years

Ask anyone you meet, “Can the U.S. government print dollars?” Their answer will always be yes. Even if they stupidly claim that banks create all dollars, they will admit that yes, dollars are printed by the U.S. Bureau of Printing and Engraving, which is part of the Treasury.

Thus, everyone knows that the U.S. government can create as many dollars as it likes, out of thin air. Hence the U.S. government can never go “broke.” Therefore no U.S. federal program can ever become “insolvent” (unless politicians choose to make it so).

Everyone knows this, and yet 99.9 percent of people pretend they don’t know it. Why? They do it in order to justify their personal hatreds (“Blacks are killing us with welfare!”) and to justify their hatred of everyone below them on the scale of wealth, power, and privilege (“Poor people are lazy!” and “There’s no free lunch!” and “We must cut entitlements!”).

This same pretense occurs in all human civilizations that use money, and it has continued everywhere since the dawn of human history. We call it the Big Lie.

Below are some examples from U.S. history. All of them are variations on the Big Lie, which continues to be repeated even now…

In addition to images that bombard us every day, there are endless blog posts that also spew the Big Lie.

But wait, here’s a bit of good news. The “non-partisan” (i.e. pro-Republican) Congressional Budget Office estimates that by the end of FY 2016, the federal budget deficit will increase slightly for the first time in seven years. The deficit will be $105 billion larger this fiscal year than last fiscal year. That’s not much, but it’s better than what we’ve had.

“Nobody’s talking about government red ink!” (Which is the U.S. economy’s black ink.)

Also the CBO says that the U.S. Treasury will sell another $9.4 trillion worth of T-securities over the next ten years. (Almost half of that amount will be bought by the U.S. government itself.) This will push up the “debt” held by the public to 86 percent of GDP by 2026, a level unseen since shortly after World War II, when millions of Americans still had “war bonds” (the purpose of which was not to “fund the war,” but to control inflation).

Pete Peterson’s son Michael is screaming.

“CBO makes clear that America’s fiscal outlook over the long term remains unsustainable!”